My current research work is in the areas of parallel magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and parallel RF excitation in MRI.  I am interested in the theoretical limits of these techniques, which I want to calculate and employ to establish a metric for assessing the performance of RF coils.  You can read more about my research interests by clicking here.  I am also maintaining a web page about parallel MRI and coil performance analysis at this link. My research advisors are Dr. Daniel Sodickson at the Center for Biomedical Imaging (CBI) of New York University's Department of Radiology and Dr. Aaron Grant at the MRI Research Division of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

Prior to beginning my Ph.D. program, I was conducting research in the field of computer assisted orthopedic surgery at the Laboratory for Medical Technology (LTM) of the Rizzoli Orthopaedic Institute, in Bologna (Italy). Back then, biomedical image processing and visualization was my main interest and I plan to reconcile some day this earlier passion with my current work.  Few years ago I had co-developed the first version of Hip-Op, a software for pre-operative planning of total hip replacement surgery, which is now a mature product, used at no charge by surgeons and researchers all around the world.

Surface coil array and simulated receive coil array sensitivity. RF coil arrays can extend the signal-to-noise ratio of small RF coils over large fields of view. They are also exploited in parallel imaging to spatially encode the MR signal. This figure was originally created by Daniel Sodickson.